The Last Kaddish

I said the last Kaddish for my mother recently. It has been 11 full months since her passing and according to Ashkenazic Jewish custom, one stops here.

The next morning, someone in shul asked me: “No more Kaddish?”

“It’s the Yom Hafsakah,” I told him, the “day of stopping” as it is called in rabbinic literature.

“So fast?” he asked. “I can’t believe it’s a year already.”

No, it was not fast at all, I wanted to tell him. It was a very long 11 months. I literally ran up the small hill to the synagogue to say the Kaddish morning, noon, and night; through snow, ice, and rain; through hurricane and brutal heat. Whether I was at home or away, wherever 10 men gathered in his name, I said the Kaddish for her three times a day. I said it with my brother and with the other men in shul (my brothers-in-mourning), in unison and solo:

May his name be exalted and sanctified… in a world he created according to his will… may his salvation blossom and the Redeemer come in our lifetimes and the lifetimes of the entire House of Israel...

In shul, by custom, the mourner leads the prayers. But there are other mourners, too, so one shares the prayer stand. Also, there is hierarchy, there is protocol. The fresher the grief, the more urgent the obligation; the one who is within the first 30 days of mourning trumps the one who is in the mourning year. And yet, one who has reached the “day of stopping” trumps everyone else again. Milestones “refresh” grief.

So, on that morning two weeks ago when I said my final Kaddish, I was chosen to lead the prayer. And I connected with my mother in that uniquely Jewish, distinctively communal way for the last time.

Remembering Mom

My mother was, above all, kind, even when she had reason not to be.

When I was barely three years old, I began a lifetime of kitchen pranks on her. One day at breakfast, she stood at the stove over an empty frying pan and asked me: “One egg or two?” Just to get a rise out of her, I said, “Six. I want six eggs.” She told me I’d never eat six eggs, but I promised her I would, so she made me a six-egg omelet. It was as big as a cake. I took two bites and could eat no more. Good-naturedly, she said, “You see?” Then she daintily tossed the rest of it out without a word. I never did that again.

In her final weeks I reminded her of this story. She gave a wan smile and remembered it exactly as I did.

When I was five or six, my mother made a marble chiffon cake for her friend. She poured the batter into the cake tin and left it on the table for a few minutes. Unbeknownst to her, before she put it in the oven, I took a tablespoon and tossed it in. The cake baked with a spoon sticking out of the top. After getting over her initial shock, she said without a trace of anger: “It looks like I will just have to bake another cake – and we’ll eat this one.”

This unwillingness to mistreat anyone was an essential piece of her personality.

As an adult, I came to understand that this unwillingness to mistreat anyone was an essential piece of her personality. Nothing was worth fighting about or making someone suffer. Even if the rest of the family would curse the enemies of my father or enemies of the Jewish people, she would say, with her English accent: “They’re still people, for Heaven’s sake! One simply cahn’t mistreat people!”

I loved her a lot but, despite our close bond, I understood her only a little. She revealed almost nothing about herself save for one revealing sliver of a story from long ago. The year was 1947 and she was not yet a teenager; she had won the starring role in a production of Snow White in Bournemouth, the famous seaside town in England. But she never performed it. Her father yanked her from the role, deeming it inappropriate for a Jewish daughter from a Hasidic family.

Though she later allowed that she had been “disappointed” at the time, she claimed to have shrugged it off. What was Snow White compared to the “riches” in store for a virtuous daughter of the Jewish people? It was left to her children to feel a modern American outrage: “You gave up a starring role?!”

She lived like many a Jewish woman of her generation: not a completely separate self, but more like a meeting place for other selves – including me. My life was hers and hers was mine, but she also belonged to her mother, her father, and her husband. If the work of life is to separate and become your own person, both she and I often failed at this simple but difficult task miserably – together and separately.

Like many sons, I embarked on a mom-improvement project for a good part of my life. I wanted to show her that the world was bigger than the kitchen, the shul, and her family’s storied rabbinic pedigree, of which she was deeply proud. She would buy none of that. She had her own way. As far as I could tell, she had her own contract with life: Be a good, loyal daughter to her parents and to the Jewish people, a good wife to her husband, dress well, speak regally – and the world will be decent and kind in return. She would never be seduced by the winds of grand desire or ambition or arrogance. For her, the little pleasures were the big pleasures: a Shabbos meal, a stroll, an episode of Masterpiece Theater, or later, Foyle’s War and Downton Abbey.

My mother was devoted to life. And during her lifetime, she abhorred death. She was beautiful and worked very hard at staying and looking young. She succeeded spectacularly. In photos taken 18 months ago, she looked decades younger than her 74 years. In fact, she never did grow old; instead she got sick. And yet, an enduring puzzle for me is that I did not feel abandoned by her when she died; in one of the ingenious, shadowy tricks of intimate relations, I felt as though I abandoned her.

Murdered in Majdanek

My zayde, her own father, told me many years ago that one is “lucky” to say Kaddish. His parents were murdered in Majdanek. He did not know of the exact date of their death and only heard about it in England after the war – from survivors. He did not get to say Kaddish for anyone.

I was connecting with my mother’s soul, suspended over earth.

At times during the months when I led the Kaddish, I felt as though I was connecting not only with God and the cosmos, but with my mother’s soul suspended over earth, hovering. Often, especially in the beginning, I could see her life and the story of her life in front of me. I constructed a montage, a mental scrapbook in my mind: an old photo of her as a 5-year-old child in a siren suit during the blitz in London. Kodak images of her as a young mother looking like Jackie Kennedy while we were growing up. And how she looked in her last few months, deathly sick.

This last sad chapter, the winter of her death, led me to other thoughts as well: God doesn’t care about her or me, I’d think, and I don’t give a whit about him either. How could one feel otherwise? I watched her life ebb away quickly under the brutal strain of cancer. I have tried to forget, but I can never forget.

I thought I should save my mother during her lifetime and of course I couldn’t; how preposterous to think that I could save her now that she was dead? And yet, this is precisely the Kaddish proposition: A son must say Kaddish to save his mother fromGehenna, Hell. The Kaddish is thought to raise the soul of the deceased out of the depths, to lighten her “punishment” and to “cool” down the fires of the afterworld – to lighten her load. Saying it is a son’s sacred obligation. We have it by way of tradition that all but the very wicked spend “only” 11 months in Gehenna; hence the Kaddish is said for 11 months only. As it is in death, so it is in life – a boy feels impelled to save his mother.

Anger at God and at the ways of the world might have at least energized me while I said Kaddish, but worse, far worse than that were periods of seemingly no feeling at all. The Kaddish often seemed its own punishment, superimposed and out of place. Obsequious and coerced praises to the Creator of death and life – Heaven forbid – a catechism to numb the mind and the soul. The mourners’ drone.

Thankfully, these periods of “deadness” did not at all characterize my very “good” mourning year. In fact, it was powerful forces set in motion long ago that led me again and again to the prayer stand – to say the Kaddish and to do it well, with feeling.

Looking back on the past 11 months, I can see that there were incidental “pleasures” or satisfactions in saying Kaddish. It made me face, at 49, my own foray into old age – getting to be an old man, with irreparable losses and gray whiskers, someone who might be called on in shul to utter something wise on occasion even though he is no rabbi.

Through those months, through the disbelief and the anger and the numbness, I said Kaddish with one goal in mind: Say a beautiful prayer in the name of a beautiful woman – my mother. Mostly, I succeeded; and multitudes stood behind me responding in unison to my Kaddish: Yehei shmeh rabba mevarakh lealam ulalmey almaya. May his great name be blessed forever, and to all eternity.

I who could not save her in life may have saved her in death. But that is over now.

Now she and I must endure one more horrible separation. The Kaddish will no longer bind us. She no longer has need of my rescue. For these past 11 months, she needed my prayer. I who could not save her in life may have saved her in death. But that is over now. What will become of me and her? Time will certainly try to break those bonds. Time always seems to win. But I am not convinced. Time and consciousness exist in two separate realms. Years go by, but a son remembers.

In a sense, the Kaddish prayer was meant for my mother: a mixture of right-ness, righteousness, and piety – the spiritual equivalent of the “stiff upper lip.” There is a God despite it all. Though we may not see him – we want to see him – this is how he is seen. There is an old saying from the Rebbe of Kotzk: “Where is God?” a man asks. “Wherever you let Him in,” the rebbe answered. My mother surely would have agreed with the Hasidic master.

That first morning in shul after my Yom Hafsakah, it was quiet after service. No Kaddish. The silence was, unexpectedly, absolutely beautiful.

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About the Author

Simon Yisrael Feuerman, PsyD is a psychotherapist in private practice and is the co-director of the New Center for Psychotherapy Studies, a training center for therapists and psychoanalysts, both in Passaic, New Jersey.

He specializes in helping fathers and sons (and parents and children) get along.

He holds a doctorate in psychology from Cal Southern University at Irvine, California and a Master’s degree in Social Work from Yeshiva University. He has trained in modern psychoanalysis at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York and at the Academy for Clinical and Applied Psychoanalysis in Livingston, New Jersey.

Visitor Comments: 2

(2)
Sheldon Reich,
December 18, 2012 3:17 PM

What an Honor

My Yom Hafsakah for my Mom is this week and I can honestly say that the past 11 months were an Aliyah for her Neshama, and a rebirth for mine.
When you are counted on to lead a Minyan, you can't be even a few minutes late.
When you'd like to take a Shabbos nap but Mincha is imminent, you make it to Shul first and wait for the Minyan to form.
When you make vacations plans the exotic traveIogue must include Minyanim three times a day.
It is an honor and not at all a burden. The burden is knowing that millions of Kedoshim didn't have a proper Jewish burial, that no Shiva was sat, that no Kaddish was said, and that there is no Yahrezeit other than a random date picked off a calendar.
Baruch Hashem I was able to honor my Mother by saying Kaddish for her over the past 11 months.

(1)
Eli Bendov,
December 17, 2012 5:47 PM

Been there. Done that!!! Saying Kaddish is maybe even more for the survivor, than the departed

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I live in rural Montana where the Cholov Yisrael milk is difficult to obtain and very expensive. So I drink regular milk. What is your view on this?

The Aish Rabbi Replies:

Jewish law requires that there be rabbinic supervision during the milking process to ensure that the milk comes from a kosher animal. In the United States, many people rely on the Department of Agriculture's regulations and controls as sufficiently stringent to fulfill the rabbinic requirement for supervision.

Most of the major Kashrut organizations in the United States rely on this as well. You will therefore find many kosher products in America certified with a 'D' next to the kosher symbol. Such products – unless otherwise specified on the label – are not Cholov Yisrael and are assumed kosher based on the DOA's guarantee.

There are many, however, do not rely on this, and will eat only dairy products that are designated as Cholov Yisrael (literally, "Jewish milk"). This is particularly true in large Jewish communities, where Cholov Yisrael is widely available.

Rabbi Moshe Feinstein wrote that under limited conditions, such as an institution which consumes a lot of milk and Cholov Yisrael is generally unavailable or especially expensive, American milk is acceptable, as the government supervision is adequate to prevent non-kosher ingredients from being added.

It should be added that the above only applies to milk itself, which is marketed as pure cow's milk. All other dairy products, such as cheeses and butter, may contain non-kosher ingredients and always require kosher certification. In addition, Rabbi Feinstein's ruling applies only in the United States, where government regulations are considered reliable. In other parts of the world, including Europe, Cholov Yisrael is a requirement.

There are additional esoteric reasons for being stringent regarding Cholov Yisrael, and because of this it is generally advisable to consume only Cholov Yisroel dairy foods.

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If you anticipate feeling sad, prepare a list of things that might make you feel better. It could be talking to a specific enthusiastic individual, running, taking a walk in a quiet area, looking at pictures of family, listening to music, or reading inspiring words.

While our attitude is a major factor in sadness, lack of positive external situations and events play an important role in how we feel.

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